Professor Tanya Marsh kindly asked me to participate in the Real Estate Transactions Panel for the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Law Schools, and this Essay is my attempt, in advance, to set my thoughts to paper. I am especially pleased to join my friends and colleagues Celeste Hammond, Wilson Freyermuth, and Greg Stein on this panel. Our topic is “Keeping the ‘Real’ World in Real Estate Transactions: New Ideas, Best Practices, and Partnership Opportunities to Strengthen Teaching and Scholarship.” I am a Real Estate Transactions teacher at the Dale E. Fowler School of Law at Chapman University. My package of courses typically includes Property and Commercial Leasing as well. This is also my fifth and (I am happy to report) final year serving as associate dean of academic affairs. My focus therefore will be institutional, and to a large degree, administrative.
One thing is clear to me at the outset: my Essay will overlap Professors Hammond’s, Freyermuth’s, and Stein’s. We work on many of the same topics and in the same circles; we see one another at conferences; and to some extent, we carry the same chip on our shoulders. And here is that grudge we share: law schools only as of late have considered transactional practice to be weighty enough to deserve serious time in our curricula. As I have previously written, most of our colleagues in law school academia come from litigation backgrounds. Real estate attorneys are alien to much of our faculty. Look, if you have time, at the most common syllabi for negotiations courses. They are survey courses, but only weakly touch upon the professional work of transactional attorneys. Instead, they reflect the background of the instructors who teach these courses; they largely emphasize negotiations in the adversarial context. Dirt lawyers do not see their reflection in these courses, or for that matter in many of the doctrinal courses taught in law schools, even when the doctrinal material seems to invite a transactional approach.
There is something very revealing about serving as academic dean. I hear from students and faculty, often in those moments of frustration we all feel from time to time in the academic world. I hire part-time faculty, and to the degree possible, explain to them what is expected in their courses. The reader should keep in mind that full-time faculty are often unfamiliar with adjunct faculty, even though the latter may teach a significant portion of the curriculum. I work with faculty (full- and part-time) to implement new programs and to resolve problems that arise day to day.
Now, more than at any time in the past, I function as a compliance officer: law schools must meet standards set by both the American Bar Association (the “ABA”) and regional accrediting agencies and respond to reporting and survey requests. The associate dean for academic affairs is heavily involved in all of these efforts.
Yet throughout all of this work (or perhaps despite all of this work), I remain a teacher and real estate lawyer. My two worlds—academic dean and real estate teacher—collide more often than one might think.
So, with the “who am I and why am I in a position to opine” out of the way, I would like to speak (and write) just a bit about several matters of importance to me, especially now that my term as associate dean for academic affairs winds down.
What makes for a good real estate transactions and practice-oriented course? Is there a learning arc for real estate transactions— that is, is there a “best” way to set up real estate courses in your curriculum? Whether you are full-time faculty, an attorney seeking your first teaching position, or part-time faculty, how do you sell your faculty or associate dean (or both) on the idea that your school would benefit from more real estate oriented courses? The answers to these questions run together, and I will allow my answers to these questions to do so here.
As I began to sketch out my thoughts, I realized that the compliance aspects of my job as associate dean would impact my answers heavily. To understand my perspective as an associate dean for academic affairs, my suggestion is that both full- and part-time real estate teachers should start by looking to the new ABA Learning Outcomes and Assessment Standards. These standards will be primary in any conversation you may have with the associate dean concerning emphasis programs, course packages, new course additions, and curricular resources on a going-forward basis. And this is where I start now.
